Mathematicians are n’t renowned for their societal skills . But in a quest to find love , Chris McKinlay from UCLA realised he could use his analytic skills to his advantage — byhacking OkCupid .
Wired has a great featureabout how the 35 - twelvemonth - honest-to-goodness PhD student decide he “ should be dating like a mathematician . ” Realizing his compatability , as calculated by OkCupid , with women in Los Angeles was “ abysmal , ” he decided to alter thing . Wired explain how :
While his dissertation oeuvre continued to consort on the side , he set up 12 fake OkCupid business relationship and wrote a Python script to manage them . The book would search his target demographic ( heterosexual and epicene woman between the historic period of 25 and 45 ) , visit their Thomas Nelson Page , and scrape their profiles for every scrap of available information : ethnicity , height , smoker or nonsmoking car , astrological sign—”all that crap , ” he say .
To find the survey answer , he had to do a bit of extra sleuthing . OkCupid lets users see the responses of others , but only to questions they ’ve answer themselves . McKinlay set up his bot to just suffice each question randomly — he was n’t using the dummy profile to draw any of the cleaning woman , so the reply did n’t matter — then outflank the women ’s answer into a database .
Sadly , such behavior gets noticed — and stamped out — by OkCupid , but that did n’t stop McKinlay making his bots appear more human . In turn , he at last manage to glean the kind of data that chair him to find his “ favorable cluster ” of women : the group in which he might stand a chance of finding true love .
Did he ? I ’m not going to break the surprise . Go read Wired ’s rattling featureto find out . [ Wired ]
Image byAlice Bartlettunder Creative Commons license
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